Setting Realistic SEO Expectations

Jill WhalenCEO and Founder of High Rankings wrote an interesting article about SEO Expectations in her newsletter, shortly after I posted my SEO post on this site.

It is a sharp read, about being realistic in your SEO campaign. It doesn’t sugarcoat anything, so if you are looking for someone who is going to tell you they can get you to #1 overnight, this is not the place. This is actually why I trust Jill – she doesn’t make false claims, she is realistic about what it takes to get ranked well in the search engines. If you are looking for instant gratification, her article may not do the trick. It will, however, talk about realistic steps to take to make your site rank well consistently!

After reading it, I contacted Jill and asked her if I could mention it here. She promptly gave me permission and sent me a link to where it is posted online. I think it is a great read about setting real expectations for your SEO campaign.

I especially agreed with these comments under the subheading of What Exactly Is Good Content?:

Good content is unique. Really and truly unique. It is creative ideas that simply popped into your head which nobody else in your space has thought of yet…

And it’s (say it with me) making your site the best it can be for your site visitors AND the search engines.

And, be sure to read her section called It’s About Targeted Traffic, Not Rankings – which starts with:

As we move forward in this industry, webmasters, site owners, and SEOs need to shift their focus from asking how they can get this keyword to this position in this engine to how they can get more targeted traffic and convert it into customers.

Bethany Siegler

Bethany is the founder of UniqueThink, an online marketing and web design/development firm in Boulder, CO. She specializes in WordPress websites and blogs, Email Marketing and overall marketing strategies.

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2 comments on “Setting Realistic SEO Expectations”

Bethany
You and Jill make good points. There are questions like
– rate of conversion, or does the high ranking result in achieving results we wanted?
– does high ranking matter if the search volume index is low or non-existent?

As an organizer of a “Social Clique” within LinkedIn, I tried to achieve SEO nirvana for the Boulder Net group. I was working with 0 budget except for the opportunity cost of my time. I found to my surprise that search for “Boulder Network” or “Boulder Networking” gave links to pages related to the group in the first page of Google search results.

But I decided to dig deeper. From Google trends I found that these search terms hardly register any search volume. So a high rank does not matter.

Even if we agreed it mattered, I saw not much change in conversion rate (membership in LinkedIn group). Most of the membership is now driven by search within LinkedIn.

The net is, SEO success should not be measured just by the high ranking.

And, I agree, it is good to dig deeper – depending on the budget of the client (in this case, it was more a matter of your time, since it was your own group). When they don’t have a big budget, I find it helps to have them use social media sites to guide folks to their main site.

You did a smart thing by driving folks within LinkedIn. I am a big fan of having a presence on multiple (and appropriate) social media sites, so if you haven’t consider using some other tools like Twitter, as well.